Women Encounter Technology: Changing Patterns of Employment in the Third World (UNU, 1995, 356 pages)

13. Gender perspectives on health and safety in information processing

(introductory text...)

International trends in information processing employment

Reconstructing women as 'cheap' labour: New technology employment or the same old story?

Health hazards of work with computers and keyboards: The experience from Australia and Europe

The relationship between RSI and technology in the workplace

LDC experience

Learning from international experience

Notes

References

Learning from international experience

Clearly more research is necessary to assess the extent of health
problems among keyboard operatives in LDCs, and particular attention must be
paid to the specifics of their working routines, tasks and allied problems. In
the light of the Australian literature and other studies it is possible to
suggest what the parameters of the problems may be.

First, activities in which standards of productivity and speed are
the basis for payment, job security, and promotion are likely to be those in
which the risk of RSI is greater. However, offshore data entry facilities may in
fact be less pressurised than large workplaces in the public or corporate
sector, if a continuous flow of work cannot be guaranteed.6 This is
an important observation, since it means that the location and nature of the
activity cannot in themselves be used to predict the risk of the workforce,
without an accurate assessment of the particular labour process.

Second, we need to take into account that in many countries the
widespread introduction of new technology in large corporations coincides with
privatization, the deprotection of workers, and the introduction of new forms of
work organization (see, e.g. Ng, 1991: pp. 3740). It is necessary to distinguish
between the nature of the technology, the nature of the task and the ways in
which the workers are required to carry out the task.

The context in which information technology is introduced will
make a difference to the degree to which women have any leverage over how their
work is organized and controlled, and the implications of such employment cannot
be predicted a priori. There are three possibilities: the
intensification; decomposition; or recomposition of existing gender and other
social relations (Elson and Pearson, 1984). To give just one example, there are
plans to promote computers in Saudi Arabia to increase the home-based employment
opportunities of tertiary educated women, in order to maintain their seclusion
(Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, n.d.).

Third, the extent to which formal worker protection by trade
unions is a useful predictor of protection from the health risks of new
technology is debatable. There is evidence from the Australian literature that,
having been extremely helpful in the earlier phases of the Australian epidemic,
the unions failed to combat attempts to psychologize the condition, and have not
taken up the long-term issue of what happens to expelled and injured workers
(Meekosha and Jakubowicz, 1991). The study carried out by the RSI sufferers
reports that 60 per cent found their union to be unhelpful (ACT RSI, 1992). Ng
(1991: pp. 36-7) also reports that the union did not see the health and safety
protection of women workers as a priority.

But we should also be clear that information technology workers
cannot necessarily be expected to take direct action on health hazards. L.
Harris (1989) reports that women workers in an American chemical factory in
County Mayo, Ireland, refused to take industrial action although they knew that
the raw material they worked with had been banned elsewhere because of its
supposed carcinogenic qualities. These workers had taken action on other
grievances, such as equal pay, but they recognized that the location of the
company in Ireland, and thus their employment, was the direct result of the
health hazard they were being exposed to. Many information technology workers
are in a similar position: they may or may not be informed about the risks of
such employment, and may or may not have some bargaining power to address their
concerns, but their response is mediated by a complex set of objectives
including the need to earn an income and the benefits they obtain from
employment in terms of association, socializing and status.

Managerial strategies can exploit these contradictions. In
Jamaica, companies followed explicit strategies to prevent the unionization of
data entry workers, lest they emulated the well-known and feared militancy of
garment factory workers in the free trade zones (R. Pearson, 1993). There has
also been a conscious attempt to promote the notion that keyboard operators were
different, and superior to, assembly-line production workers (Freeman), similar
to the differentiation made between electronics and garments workers in the
Mexican maquiladoras (Pearson, 1991b). The 'clean' image of information
technology work, in contrast to the environmentally hazardous emissions of
process manufacturing, can also be utilized to diminish the perceived health
hazards associated with computer work.

Such considerations may be central in understanding the responses
of low paid semi-skilled workers, but not of professional women working with
computers. It is well recognized that many women (and men) who have a much
greater autonomy over the ways in which they carry out their work - such as
academics, journalists and writers - consistently utilize computers in ways
which entail severe risks of developing RSI and other conditions, even though
they have access to very up-to-date knowledge of the risks and prevention
strategies.8 Externally imposed pressure and deadlines, as well as an
increasingly competitive environment, provide a partial explanation, but self
motivation and exploitation must also be factors.

Nor is it axiomatic that the interests of women workers,
particularly in LDCs, are antithetic to the strategies of development planners
who see the adoption and dissemination of information technology within their
economies as the route to long-term economic viability and growth. Sen's model
of 'cooperative conflict' (See, 1990), which encompasses a situation in which an
individual's utility is both in conflict with, and totally inextricable from,
that of the wider group might also prove a useful model for conceptualizing the
contradictory relationship women have to the risks and benefits from information
technology. Such a framework would seem infinitely more realistic than either a
totally negative response, which suggests that all risk-bearing employment for
women should be prohibited, or one which argues that health and safety issues
should be totally subordinated to wider issues of economic growth, employment,
and foreign exchange generation.8

The experience of advanced countries, particularly of Australia,
indicates that new times as well as new technologies require new analyses and
new strategies. There were institutional innovations by women in response to the
'epidemic', including support groups such as WRIST (Women's Repetitive Strain
Injury Support Team), in Victoria, which not only have provided support and
referral advice to sufferers but have played a central monitoring and lobbying
role in relation to changes in the institutional and legislative framework.
Workplace groups have also organized health and safety circles in an attempt to
promote collective endeavours to devise working practices that are more
rational, and have devised exercise routines which are both helpful and
practicable.

The Australian experience is in a sense a microcosm of the
contradictions that information technology presents - to producers, workers and
users. The often irrational way in which medical and other professionals have
sought to refute the links between technology, work practices and health hazards
illustrates most directly the ways in which gendered notions of legitimacy are
at the heart of the contradictions which this technology catalyses. It is the
role of gender analysis to probe the nature of these contradictions and their
gendered manifestations and responses, in order to work towards useful strategic
responses.